An Adobe executive this week defended Flash against rumored comments from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and also said performance improvements for the scrutinized, embattled Web platform are coming to the Mac.

Kevin Lynch, CTO with Adobe, spoke with Kara Swisher of BoomTown, and right off the bat he addressed comments rumored to have been said by Jobs. Earlier this month, numerous reports stated Jobs spoke with Apple employees at a company meeting, during which he allegedly said Adobe was "lazy," and most Mac crashes are due to Flash.

Swisher jokingly asked Lynch if he was lazy, and the Adobe official said he and his team work very hard on their company's product.

"It feels pretty busy around here, so I'm not sure what that's about," Lynch said. "And that's a rumor. I haven't heard that necessarily he did say that. But maybe he did, whatever."

He went on to say that regardless of whether Jobs said anything disparaging about Adobe, he and the company are receptive to public criticism. He said they are working to improve the Flash experience for users.

"We're totally open to hearing feedback like that," Lynch said. "And that's one of the really important things to do in a situation like this, when people are complaining about something -- not going into internal mode, or whatever, (but) really listening to what people are saying. We do that with our customers, we do that with our critics, and often there are kernels in there that we ought to do something about, and so we are."

He then revealed that Adobe is working to improve the performance of Flash on the Mac. Currently, he admitted, video renders are more processor intensive on Apple's hardware than they are on Windows machines.

Lynch also made note of Adobe's forthcoming Creative Suite 5 for Mac, which he said is "just terrific." Earlier this week, AppleInsider offered an exclusive look at the software, which will include a 64-bit version of Photoshop.

"We work with Apple all of the time," Lynch said. "We're one of the biggest Macintosh software makers around."

Apple and Adobe have had a high-profile dispute over the use of Flash on the Web since the iPhone debuted in 2007 without support for the Web format. Apple has famously shunned Flash, with the Web plugin having no support in the iPhone or iPod touch Safari browser.

Lynch said that 19 of the top 20 smartphone makers (Apple being the only one absent) have signed on to the company's Open Screen Project and its push for Flash on mobile devices. He also said that 85 percent of the top Web sites on the Internet feature Flash content.

"You can get a great experience with Flash on a smartphone," he said.

But Flash's spotty performance history on the Mac platform and processor-intensive requirements have led Apple to support alternatives such as HTML5. The Cupertino, Calif., company has even encouraged developers to "stick with standards" and use CSS, JavaScript and Ajax instead of Adobe Flash.

Lynch told Swisher that Adobe is supportive of the progression of HTML, including HTML5. This week it was said that an Adobe official was attempting to hold up advancement of the HTML5 spec, though those claims were later disputed.

"I know that there are certainly some who are working on HTML5 who are out to kill Flash," Lynch said, adding that he doesn't see the push for HTML5 as a move to "kill" Flash.

This is just marketing spin and trying pucker to Apple and slow down HTML5.
Sorry Adobe, you had your chance, we are moving on to software that more innovative, less resource draining and does not make my Mac act like Windows and freeze.

This is way to little too late. Apparently they listen, just not to Mac users. How they could possible miss the criticism over the years is beyond me. To state they they are receptive is a joke. Exactly how many adobe programmers does it take to fix their software?

What a cop out. If you hate it so much just uninstall Flash. Why would you install click to Flash? Oh let me guess you might want to see something built in Flash- so just in case right?

Click to Flash also does substitution of Flash with QuickTime for some cases as well, so its not just a flash blocker. And yes, some things need flash, sad as that is, and I'd rather filter on those selectively than have all Flash load automatically and bog down my CPU.

Click to Flash also does substitution of Flash with QuickTime for some cases as well, so its not just a flash blocker. And yes, some things need flash, sad as that is, and I'd rather filter on those selectively than have all Flash load automatically and bog down my CPU.

I agree, web browsing is also much snappier getting rid of all that flash crap on web sites that isn't part of the content.

It's kind of like using cheap toilet paper in some public bathroom. You use it, but you don't have to like it.

That's not Adobe's fault. I use Click to Flash as well because the bathroom analogy perfectly describes the problem. Flash ads! But I have Flash ads now that can't be blocked by Click to Flash and also run on iPhone so good luck with that.

It doesn't mean they'll do anything about it. Where is the off button for flash ads? Why do I have to use third party software for that? At least put a putton on every ad, if not a global one. That's not taking feedback seriously.

Just look at Flash on PPC Macs -- WHAT A JOKE, it runs like garbage on a G4, and has for as long as I can remember. In other words, Adobe (and Macromedia before them) NEVER optimized it for the Mac, and I have ZERO confidence in the company's ability to make it a good performer.

YAWN. Click To Flash is my best web browser companion EVER! I cannot wait to see Flash eradicated, it has become the scourge of the web!

"Lynch said that 19 of the top 20 smartphone makers (Apple being the only one absent) have signed on to the company's Open Screen Project and its push for Flash on mobile devices. He also said that 85 percent of the top Web sites on the Internet feature Flash content."

Sure Keith. In the form of invasive flash ads... what a wonderful legacy to leave behind. The rest of the article is just fluff... Oh yeah, we listen, we just don't DO anything about it. Give us a decade and we'll see. It's like the world's worst dad x100. Can we stop at that ice cream store? Maybe...

And say goodbye to the vast majority of video on the 'web. Personally, I prefer machines that can run Flash effortlessly, rather than machines which need useful stuff to be disabled in order to function properly.

That's not Adobe's fault. I use Click to Flash as well because the bathroom analogy perfectly describes the problem. Flash ads! But I have Flash ads now that can't be blocked by Click to Flash and also run on iPhone so good luck with that.

Ads aren't the issue. It doesn't matter what platforms are out there, there will always be ads. The problem is Adobe's pure negligence when it comes to performance complaints on a Mac. They have ignored the issue for years.

What a cop out. If you hate it so much just uninstall Flash. Why would you install click to Flash? Oh let me guess you might want to see something built in Flash- so just in case right?

Not a cop-out... just a way to keep Flash content from automatically loading and running... speeds up page loads on Safari. And when there is a video that I'd like to watch, then I can just click on it to load it.

Click to Flash is more of a transitional tool than anything else. It's really sad to think that a web browser plug-in is capable of even slowing down Safari on a Quad-Core 3GHz system.

And this whole thing of finally improving Flash on the Mac, well why now? Why not 5 years ago? Adobe is just working the marketing machine because they are afraid.

Disclaimer: The things I say are merely my own personal opinion and may or may not be based on facts. At certain points in any discussion, sarcasm may ensue.

Adobe should have reacted the moment flash blockers started to appear for browsers. The very fact that these exist show that Flash is indeed a problem for internet usability and pleasantness. If Flash was so great, do you think that Flash blockers would be the most downloaded add-ons for Firefox and Chrome ? (I'm mentioning those 2 because their add-on pages allow to compare the popularity of various add-ons.) In business, there is the 1:10 rule : for every person that complains or show dissatisfaction, there are 10 other people out there who are the same but didn't say so. So Flash blockers are a very serious symptom that something is wrong in Flashland.

The second reason Adobe should have reacted is because the Flash blockers allow users to realize that one can live without Flash and it's not that bad to not have Flash in your web pages. So people start wondering why they should install this security hole in the first place. Leading to less and less demand for Flash. This in turn leads to a downward spiral : less demand, less sites requiring Flash. Less site requiring Flash, less interest for Flash...

This is quite the misleading statement. If you just read it without parsing exactly what it says, you would think that it's no problem to get Flash working on any smartphone. But it's not.

It should be something like:

You can get a great experience with Flash on a smartphone, if the smartphone maker designed the hardware and OS specifically with Flash in mind, giving Flash direct bare metal access to one of a handful of hardware video decoders, and if the Flash developer than creates a smartphone-specific version of their content [both UI and actual content] that fits into the users display, and enables the use of the completely different method of interaction that smartphones use vs desktops.

Adobe is trying to sell the idea that it's trivial for Flash to be added to the iPhone, and that once it's on the iPhone, all the web sites that use Flash will just look and work great without any changes. And they know both parts of that statement are definitely NOT true.

Ads aren't the issue. It doesn't matter what platforms are out there, there will always be ads. The problem is Adobe's pure negligence when it comes to performance complaints on a Mac. They have ignored the issue for years.

<quote=
>Currently, he admitted, video renders are more processor intensive on Apple's hardware than they are on Windows machines</quote>

ITS THE SAME FREAKIN' HARDWARE!

I've not tested it, but I've also never heard of any one saying that on an iMac dual-booted into Windows Flash is also slow. But have heard that Flash under Linux is also crap. Makes me think they have a competence problem with *nix OSes.